Nothing tests an artist’s mettle more severely than having to negotiate a full-blown case of tech-horror. Half way through the third number last night, a particularly sweet version of “Summer Morning Rain“, an ear-scorching sonic car crash brought everything skidding to a decidedly ugly halt. Simone Felice leapt from his chair like a scalded cat and muttered something about lawyers. For a moment I thought he was actually going to scarper. And it had all started so well.

With the subject of the legitimacy of the label “world music” having just had another airing in The Guardian, it seems fitting that Mali’s favourite musical couple should be releasing their least “world music” album to date. For essentially, Folila (which translates as "music" in Bambara) is a blues/rock album.

He has terrible tusks, and terrible claws, and terrible teeth in his terrible jaws… Ah wait now, that’s The Gruffalo. Mark Lanegan doesn’t have any of the above (although he does have tattooed fists and a considerable jaw, and past heroin addiction probably hasn’t played too well with the old teeth).

After a nine-month absence, during which Joe Muggs explored the world's largest natural bassbin in the Amazonian rain forest and Thomas H Green waited to receive his passport back from the Bolivian government, Singles & Downloads returns to celebrate the best in new music. From the ambient to the danceable, the glorious to the outright embarassing, we present the juiciest possible representative cross section of modern popular music.

The fourth album by Carolina Chocolate Drops, the old-time string and jug band with 21^st-century attitude, fizzes with their characteristic energy. They’re essentially a live band, great communicators and purveyors of a musical style that was designed to brighten the evenings of hard-working mountain people in the Piedmont region of the Appalachians. The upfront quality of Buddy Miller’s production and the contagious joy the musicians bring to their singing and playing goes a long way towards transcending the limitations of the studio.

The credibility of blues-rock has ebbed and flowed wildly for 40 years. Once upon a time it was simply the common currency for all major British and American rock bands, as exemplified by Led Zeppelin. Punk’s Seventies heyday put the kybosh on all that and blues-rock has been a less loved creature since, redolent of lazy parochial pub jam bands. However, from George Thorogood and the Destroyers to the White Stripes via Mississippi’s Fat Possum Records, it’s also become a major niche flavour for connoisseurs of raw guitar Americana - the scuzzier, the better.

I last saw Dan Auerbach and Pat Carney’s primitive garage blues duo a little under four years ago, touring their sixth album Attack & Release. Truth be told, I found them slightly heavy going. Big riffs, big drums, back-of-a-beer mat lyrics and not much else. Heard one, heard 'em all. My, but they’ve grown. Or, at least, their audience has. 

Mark Lanegan, ex-junkie and one-time singer with Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age, so fully inhabited his cover of  “The Beast in Me” on last year’s Hangover II soundtrack you could easily have assumed he'd written it. With Blues Funeral, his first full solo outing since 2004, he again uses his grated baritone to express the twilight zones of the soul. The result? A magnificent account of a life lived to within an inch of its limits. 

Cesaria Evora was one of the great singers, her lived-in voice and poignant, heart-wrenching music affecting nearly all who heard it. She had been in poor health after a heart attack in 2008 and a stroke last year, and died on the island of São Vicente in Cape Verde where she was born. I had the honour and pleasure of meeting her in Lisbon in 2001, on the occasion of the release of one of her best albums, São Vicente Di Longe. She seemed hugely modest and rather amazed at the fact that she had become a global star.